Nerds wonder openly what would happen if the Enterprise fought an Imperial Star Destroyer, or who would win in a battle between Superman and Wolverine, so don’t get all apples to pears on us, man, if we want to see how the average micro tower would stack up against the incoming next gen consoles.
Since the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 aren’t out yet, we had to scour the Internet for details about the hardware inside. Not all of the specs are set in concrete, so they could change, but this close to launch, we think we have a pretty good idea about what the two new consoles will be offering. To represent the PC, we went with the bang for the buck winner, iBuypower’s Revolt.
CPU Performance
Both Microsoft and Sony showing up with eight-core, AMD Jaguar x86 processors running at around 1.6GHz must be like two bitter high school frenemies showing up to prom with the same dress. The Jaguar core itself is an improved Bobcat core, which has been used in the Brazos APUs. In a nutshell, they’re low power, out of order, x86-64 processing cores. For what they are, they’re not bad. But in actual x86 performance, even with eight cores, they don’t compare to the Core i7-4770K. That Haswell chip in the iBuypower Revolt would very likely eat an Xbox One or PlayStation 4 alive and then floss its teeth with the console’s power cord. The good news for the console crowd is that the CPU doesn’t do that much of the heavy lifting anymore. Even better, since developers highly optimize for consoles, audio processing, OS management, and other mundane tasks will likely be fine, since the performance envelope is well known on both consoles. But make no mistake, there’s no question as to what is more powerful in x86 performance.
Winner: PCGraphics Performance
Graphics performance on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 is a hotly debated topic that’s been burning up the Internet. From the limited information we have, the PS4 has the lead in pure graphics grunt. Its shader performance of 1.84TFLOPs is quite a bit higher than the Xbox One’s 1.23TFLOPS. In fact, so much has been said of the graphics disparity between the PS4 and Xbox One that Microsoft officials recently announced that the Xbox’s GPU clocks have been goosed from 800MHz all the way to 853MHz (yawn)— regardless, that still leaves the PS4 the leader. Oh, right, but what about the PC? That Titan has compute performance of 4.5TFLOPs, so figure it out.
Winner: PCMemory
The PS4’s 8GB of GDDR5 and 176GB/s of bandwidth had even us whistling. Especially when you consider the Xbox’s bandwidth is down at 68GB/s. The good news for the Xbox is that it has 32MB of embedded SRAM that looks to offer from 102GB/s to 192GB/s of memory bandwidth to help ame-liorate its relatively low system and graphics bandwidth. What about the PC? Isn’t its system bandwidth pretty low at a theoretical 34GB/s? Yes, but for system chores it’s fine. Gaming PCs almost all use discrete graphics, so it’s really the GeForce GTX Titan’s bandwidth we need to break out the ruler for. In that case, it’s 6GB of GDDR5 on a 384-bit interface for roughly 288GB/s of graphics bandwidth.
Winner: PCPrice
Yeah, you knew this was coming. The Xbox is $500, and the PS4 is $400. The iBuypower Revolt is $2,000. Winner: Console? That depends. If we were talking purely gaming, perhaps. But the magic of the PC is that it’s a multipurpose tool. Yes, it’s the absolute best gaming platform but it’s also used for running Microsoft Office, editing photos, encoding videos, compiling applications, and is a limitless platform for exploring the Internet, too. So what exactly is the better value here? If you were holed up in your dorm or apartment due to a zombie apocalypse, would you rather have a PC or next gen console? Yeah, we’d take the PC, too.
Winner: PC
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